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Question from a Newbie

I have a quick question.
I'll be sitting in class using my computer and a message box will pop up in the middle of my screen with a short humorous message :] (usually the whole class receives the message) I'm sure it is a student (as a someone who is employed by the college would be reprimanded for these sometimes crude messages because it is kind of an anal retentive college)
I'm wondering how someone would be able to do this.

The first thing that came into mind when I read this was the net send command. If you have an NT or 2000 network, try it. Just bring up your command prompt, and type something like this:

net send "recipient" "message"

Don't use the quotes, by the way. If you don't know a computer name or a username to send to, you can use a * instead of a recipient name, and it will send to everybody on the network. If this works, that's probably what's going on. Just be careful when you do this. It does no damage (obviously), but if the admin is anal retentive enough, they will probably get pissed, especially if you send to the whole network.

Once you play with that command for a little while, you will probably find it's a lot of fun. I have written a little batch file that sends the message "SPAM!!!" to my brother's machine about 400 times. Whenever I get bored, it's just a quick double-click, and the screaming begins!

win nt and 2k use net send format through the command prompt. winpopup needs to be opened on win 98/95 boxes in order to receive/send messages.

As for a dos attack, you can que 6 messages at a time. even if a batch is wrtten to net send, you can que 6 messages. do this to the user and everytime he logins in he'll get popups. If this is sent to a computer, whoever uses the pc will get the 6 queued messages. Do this on a domain and you'll get flamed by the admin

If you are on a Novell network... yeah, that can be done. It's fairly simple to do. But, can you describe the messagebox to us? Maybe post (upload) a screenshot? (You can take screenshots in windows by hitting the PrintScrn button (next to scroll lock and Pause/Break, above Home and End)